A federal district court judge in Idaho has declined to dismiss a lawsuit filed by a coalition of groups and journalists against a law that makes it possible for the state to jail anyone, who secretly films or records animal abuse, for a year.

In February, Idaho became the seventh state to pass an “ag-gag law” or a farm secrecy statute aimed at political speech on industrial agricultural production.

Blowing the whistle on wrongdoing creates a moral frequency that vast numbers of people are eager to hear. We don’t want our lives, communities, country and world continually damaged by the deadening silences of fear and conformity.

I’ve met many whistleblowers over the years, and they’ve been extraordinarily ordinary. None were applying for halos or sainthood. All experienced anguish before deciding that continuous inaction had a price that was too high. All suffered negative consequences as well as relief after they spoke up and took action. All made the world better with their courage.

There are many sides to whistleblowing. The one that most people don’t know about is the very personal cost, prison aside, including the high cost of lawyers and the strain on family relations, that follows the decision to risk it all in an act of conscience. Here’s a part of my own story I’ve not talked about much before.

At age 53, everything changed. Following my whistleblowing first book, We Meant Well: How I Helped Lose the Battle for the Hearts and Minds of the Iraqi People, I was run out of the good job I had held for more than 20 years with the U.S. Department of State. As one of its threats, State also took aim at the pension and benefits I’d earned, even as it forced me into retirement. Would my family and I lose everything I’d worked for as part of the retaliation campaign State was waging?

It now seems the bulk surveillance program, which collects all American consumers’ phone records, which Obama and others in government have spent months defending, will never have the public’s support. And now that Americans know about the nature of this once kept secret program, Obama and members of Congress that sought to defend the surveillance are having to support “ending” the program in some way or another. But is it all for show?

The Advocate’s interview with Glenn Greenwald reveals a lot about the lawyer-turned journalist who broke the Edward Snowden NSA leaks. And in it, Greenwald explains that during a his lengthy interview with Snowden in Hong Kong he learned what inspired and motivated the twenty-something security expert to blow the whistle on the NSA’s surveillance programs.

Hundreds of documents on the government’s secret interpretation of a section of the PATRIOT Act and the NSA’s abuse of a massive database of Americans’ phone records have been released. President Barack Obama would like the public to believe this is part of the administration’s effort to be the “most transparent administration in history.” However, that is completely dishonest because the administration never wanted to release these documents.

I had an opportunity to interview WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange at the Ecuadorian Embassy in London, where he has been granted political asylum since June 2012. Assange is wanted for questioning in Sweden over sex allegations, although he has never been charged. Assange believes that if sent to Sweden, he would be put into prison and then sent to the United States, where he is already being investigated for espionage for publishing hundreds of thousands of classified diplomatic and military memos on the WikiLeaks website.

President Barack Obama has issued and signed a secret presidential directive that the Washington Post reports is “the most extensive White House effort to date to wrestle with what constitutes an ‘offensive’ and a ‘defensive’ action in the rapidly evolving world of cyberwar and cyberterrorism.”

John Kiriakou, a former CIA agent, pled guilty this morning to disclosing information identifying a covert agent. The plea was part of a deal with prosecutors to only go to jail for up to thirty months.

The Senate Intelligence Committee, chaired by Sen. Dianne Feinstein, has proposed multiple measures purportedly to discocurage future leaks. However, the proposals, which have been included in an intelligence authorization bill for the next fiscal year, would not apply to Congress or congressional staffers and would also exempt the White House and various other Executive Branch officials.